AuditBoard announces "Accelerate" AI, Fairnow buy

Audit and GRC solutions provider AuditBoard launched Accelerate, its new AI solution designed for risk teams. The company also announced it has acquired AI governance solutions provider Fairnow.

Accelerate consolidates AuditBoard's newest AI capacities into a single experience that allows users to access insights and automate processes. It features an Audit Agent to accelerate control testing and documentation cycles. The model can be used to select representative, risk-based samples as well as annotate large volumes of receipts and supporting documents to streamline testing. This can help reduce or even eliminate manual evidence collection and reviews, and move away from point-in-time assurance with continuous auditing and control testing. The solution can turn raw notes into audit-ready artifacts to glean insights and generate stakeholder reports, as well as consolidate progress and insights from multiple audits into status summaries. The AI can automatically transform walkthrough notes into detailed narratives and cross-audit summaries that surface key risks, processes and trends.

"Accelerate is a huge unlock for how our customers run their teams," said Happy Wang, chief product and technology officer at AuditBoard. "GRC teams can leverage the enterprise-grade capabilities of AI Accelerate to automate fieldwork, generate audit-ready outputs and surface real-time insights — truly becoming strategic partners for their business."

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AuditBoard, on the same day, also announced its acquisition of AI governance platform Fairnow, which offers a streamlined AI registry, dynamic risk assessments, and intelligent automated compliance with frameworks such as NIST AI Risk Management Framework, ISO/IEC 42001, and the EU AI Act, which provide structured guidelines for responsible AI development and deployment by addressing areas such as fairness, transparency, risk management and data governance. An AuditBoard spokesperson said the deal reflects how GRC is evolving from a compliance checklist to a strategic AI risk infrastructure.

The company plans to integrate FairNow into AuditBoard's Connected Risk Platform to create a unified, AI-first solution for managing all enterprise risk in a way that aligns with the foundation of AuditBoard's natural-language workflows, continuous auditing and monitoring, document intelligence and agentic AI capacities. Guru Sethupathy, CEO and founder of FairNow, felt joining AuditBoard made sense given the priorities of both companies. 

"FairNow believes that governance will be the key enabler in the age of AI — managing risks while building trust and driving adoption," Sethupathy said in a statement. "Our mission to simplify AI governance will be accelerated with AuditBoard, the clear leader in AI-powered connected risk. Joining AuditBoard is the logical next step in our journey to scale our impact. We look forward to working with the AuditBoard team to solidify the platform's position as the global go-to solution for modern risk management - intelligent, automated, and connected."

An AuditBoard spokesperson said FairNow will be completely integrated into the company so it will not retain its original branding. The entire FairNow team is expected to join AuditBoard.